As the election campaign overheats, here are a couple critiques of current Biden and future Trump policies affecting the Forest Service.
WildEarth Guardians recently reviewed a FY 2022 Forest Service Report to Congress, which discusses “timber program performance.” (I’d note that the context was “the unexpected increase in demand for lumber during the recent period of quarantine and social distancing due to the coronavirus pandemic…”) WildEarth Guardians said,
The document outlines how the agency can increase logging in our national forests by at least 25 percent above current levels, to four billion board feet each year! The last time the Forest Service sold that much timber from our national forests was 1993, the year the agency started developing the Northwest Forest Plan to address habitat loss for the northern spotted owl caused by—that’s right—overlogging. That level of logging was not sustainable then and it isn’t sustainable now, especially in light of what we know now about the importance of protecting mature and old-growth forests to mitigate the effects of climate change. Nevertheless, the Forest Service wants to turn the clock back and actually spells out just how it wants to do that.
The remedy, according to the Forest Service, is not to stop proposing ecologically damaging timber sales that violate the law, but rather to ask Congress for “legislative fixes” that make it harder, if not impossible, to challenge ecologically damaging timber sales in court. Streamlining environmental reviews and limiting public input, the Forest Service says, “will help increase timber volume sold.”
We shouldn’t wonder why there is skepticism from these parts when the Forest Service says “trust us.” As WildEarth Guardians summarized (with their emphasis):
Such perverse incentives are a stark reminder that timber production remains the overarching priority for the Forest Service while all other values, like wildlife or climate mitigation, are a distant second. As the Forest Service seeks to push timber production levels even higher, those of us who care about our national forests must be ready to speak up and tell the agency and lawmakers that we cannot turn the clock back to a time when unsustainable logging pushed species like the northern spotted owl to the brink of extinction.
An article in the Huffington Post focused on the Department of Interior (but has implications for national forests), and indicates the incentives would be even more perverse for management of our public lands under Trump II, requiring even more public oversight (if they don’t take away the ability to do that):
Pendley’s blueprint for Trump, if he should win in November, includes holding robust oil and gas lease sales on- and offshore, boosting drilling across northern Alaska, slashing the royalties that fossil fuel companies pay to drill on federal lands, expediting oil and gas permitting, and rescinding Biden-era rules aimed at protecting endangered species and limiting methane pollution from oil and gas operations.
Along with a series of actions to boost drilling and mining across the federal estate, Pendley calls for a future Republican administration to not only dismantle existing protected landscapes but limit presidents’ ability to protect others in the future. He advocates for vacating Biden’s executive order establishing a goal of conserving 30% of federal lands and waters by 2030; rescinding the Biden administration’s drilling and mining moratoriums in Colorado, New Mexico and Minnesota; reviewing all Biden-era resource management plans, which cover millions of acres of federal lands; and repealing the Antiquities Act, the landmark 1906 law that 18 presidents have used to designate 161 national monuments.
If that reads like a fossil fuel industry wish list, it’s because it is. Rather than personally calling for the keys to America’s public lands to be turned over to America’s fossil fuel sector, Pendley let the head of a powerful industry group do it for him.
“Beyond posing an existential threat to democracy, Project 2025 puts special interests over everyday Americans,” said Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group that shared its research on Project 2025 with HuffPost. “The dangerous initiative has handed off its policy proposals to the same industry players who have dumped millions into the project — and who will massively benefit from its industry-friendly policies.”
“They could have found any number of mainstream conservatives to write their agenda for them. They didn’t,” Weiss said. “They picked the notorious anti-public lands extremist, because that is at the end of the day what they want.
Isn’t it odd that both extremes use timber volumes as a measure of the effectiveness of their agendas? Even the government is using those numbers in various possibly nefarious ways. The public really isn’t interested in how difficult it might be to reach volumes, with current funding. Region 6 can never go back to the logging it did before, and I think we can all agree that replacing that amount with thinning volume is not very doable.
However, there does need to be a ‘revolution’ in how forests are managed, in owl country. We need to be able to thin forests, without being subject to litigation. This can only come from those three “C-Words” of collaboration, consensus and compromise, in that order. An agreement and compromise would give all sides (well, almost all) the certainty that is needed to push ahead.
It also seems that the Forest Service still has many critical problems it hasn’t really addressed since Biden took office. They got the funds they said they needed. Their problems weren’t all communicated to Congress, even if the lawmakers really wanted to actually hear them.
Everything built in US should be made with USA 🇺🇸 timber! Canadian government subsidies lumber to be sold in US to undercut our own retail costs!! All foreign timber should be taxed so that its cost is higher than what’s harvested in USA 🇺🇸!!!
Kathleen, there are tariffs on Canadian lumber. https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/02/lumber-tariffs
I know forest economists who spent their career on the Canadian lumber issue and have now retired, so the trade issue has been going on for some time.
Exactly Larry! I find it interesting how the Wild Earth Guardian’s spin the data and all the blame on the Spotted Owl on logging. The fact that litigation halts virtually any and all thinning or restoration projects is also glossed over, along with the facts concerning the millions of acres that have burned on our national forests since the North West Forest Plan began. Heaven forbid that projects to harvest dead trees along road corridors would be allowed without a lawsuit or threat of one. Let alone the incredible amount of timber left to rot inside these massive fire perimeters could be salvaged. In my area of the Cascades one would think that the City of Oakridge’s annual Tree Planting Festival 70+ years would be planting trees within the Cedar Creek burn scar or even on some of the ground within the Cedar Creek Fire scar that was planted by the community as far back as 1953 that was incinerated. NOPE. Once again the Festival will plant ceremonial trees somewhere inside the city limits despite the fact that the 120000 acre Cedar Creek fire forced the entire town to be evacuated in 2022.
Jon, I don’t have Pendley phobia.. problem is the Trump Admin tried to do bad (to Huffpo) stuff and were stymied by the courts. Now we are to fear that those same forces will.. give up? mysteriously disappear? if Trump were to be elected.
Not sure I’m following, but my fear is driven by Project 2025 and a realization of what “Trump being Trump” is likely to mean a second time around (including for a swath of public employees deemed not “loyal” enough to keep their jobs). (The “rule of law” is supposed to keep this from happening, but that is obviously under a lot of stress right now.)
Hmmm. I inhabit centrist political internet space right now and there are (at least) two sets of stories about exactly what “the rule of law” is, and what each party is doing to mess with it. It seems to me like there are abstractions “democracy” that when translated to real world situations, one group points at one set of conditions, and the other groups points at the other set. Also “misinformation”. Some concerns about specific conditions are M/l bipartisan, and even some solutions!. I think we’d have much more helpful discussions if we considered the specific rather than the abstract.
Pendley was talking about specific proposals found in Project 2025, which a lot of knowledgeable people are taking seriously as the informal Republican platform. I don’t really want to debate them here – I just thought they should be on our radar for public lands. ( I guess I don’t spend enough time on the right fringe, because I have not heard about their alternative take on the “rule of law.”)
Yes, if DJT wins the election, and they are actually proposed, then I think we’ll have plenty of time to talk about them. Certainly the “rule of law” sounds like a good idea.. but given the randomness of courts and juries, and groups of lawyers fighting with each other, and some thinking the Supreme Court needs to be changed.. sigh. It seems to me that each group has their own ideas about what’s wrong with our current system. Which would make more sense to discuss (not here) than abstractions like “the rule of law.”
Maybe there would be some benefit in debating them before the election: “It would change the nature of the federal bureaucracy,” to remove protections from senior civil servants, he said. “This would mean that if you told your boss that what he or she was proposing was illegal, impractical, [or] unwise that they could brand you disloyal and terminate you.” (Kenneth Baer, who served as a senior OMB official under President Barack Obama.) They bring up the failed BLM move to Grand Junction and other examples of “draining the swamp.” Good for the Forest Service?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/27/politics/trump-federal-workers-2nd-term-invs/index.html
Jon, just my opinion, I don’t think that anyone is going to vote based on “what’s good for the Forest Service.” Plus our experience was that Trump would try things and most of them didn’t work out due to pushback from the courts or the Hill or both. So I’m not going to spend mental space on what might happen if Trump gets elected again, when there are so many efforts the Biden Admin is doing right now (in our space) that don’t receive adequate scrutiny.
Increased oil and timber production…god forbid we reduce our dependence on nations like Saudi Arabia for our economy’s basic needs.
Big Pondo, you’re living in the past. The U.S. is a net exporter of oil:
“In 2023, the United States exported about 10.15 million b/d of petroleum to 173 countries and 3 U.S. territories (American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and U.S. Virgin Islands). Crude oil exports of about 4.06 million b/d accounted for 40% of total U.S. gross petroleum exports. The resulting total net petroleum imports (imports minus exports) were about -1.64 million b/d, which means that the United States was a net petroleum exporter of 1.64 million b/d in 2023.”
That’s good to hear, thanks for the info Andy.
I think the USFS is trying to make it possible to actually accomplish a program of fuel reduction and silviculture practices to help our forest survive the continuation of climate change and in the process would produce an added volume of forest products